Airplanes are one of the most common modes of transportation, and many have different opinions as to what makes a good flight. Some might focus on the snacks, others might love the leg room, and others might be satisfied by a simple low price. We sought to examine the root of what defines a satisfying or unsatisfying flight, using demographic data and traveler-submitted ratings on various aspects of the flight experience to find this root of satisfaction.
Taking a broad look at all the data, we had over 100,000 customers surveyed, which gave us a lot of stability in the data but also required us to sift through what was actually important to us. We decided to focus on the column titled, "satisfaction" as our overall comparison measure, seeing if we could identify the principal factor driving the travelers to respond in a certain way. Our first visualization describes the raw percentage of travelers satisfied vs. those neutral or dissatisfied, allowing for our first insight: a small majority of travelers are neutral or dissatisfied with their flights.
We will explore the connection between satisfaction and travel time, gender/age, and service ratings as well as our overall conclusions in the following sections.
Our first broad category of variables relates to travel time, seeing if factors such as the duration of the flight and any arrival and departure delays connected to the flight affect customer satisfaction.
In looking at this category, we first constructed a flight time boxplot. Interestingly longer flight distances tend to make customers more satisfied. This may be because airlines may tend to over focus their service and resources on longer flights. This chart may suggest to airlines that they should spend more on shorter flights given there is less satisfaction there. Perhaps, they could provide some quality features they do on longer flights on shorter flights such as a premium first class with a bed.
We also made a scatter plot highlighting the correlation between delays in minutes and satisfaction. As you can see, as the delays increase there is a greater percentage of neutral or dissatisfied customers. Sadly, given the amount of data we have it is difficult to tell the trends in the bottom left of the graph, but it looks like the majority of those in the bottom left are satisfied with their flight experience. Therefore, if airlines want to increase customer satisfaction they should work on the timeliness of their flights.
Our second broad category of variables relates to gender and age, seeing if the gender of the flyer or their age has a broad affect on customer satisfaction.